‘Penny Dreadful’ Creator Teams Up With Meryl Streep

For anyone looking for proof Penny Dreadful is indeed dead, this might do it.

The Showtime series’ creator, John Logan, has just moved on to a new project that will give him a chance to work with both actress Meryl Streep and producer J.J. Abrams on the limited series The Nix.

Logan – a three-time Oscar nominee for films like Gladiator, The Aviator and Hugo – will act as both the showrunner and executive producer for the series based on the Nathan Hill novel published earlier this year. Warner Bros. Television is producing the series, according to The Hollywood Reporter, but it’s yet to find a network home.

Hill’s critically acclaimed debut novel – which debuted at No. 5 on the New York Times best-seller list – centers on college professor and stalled writer Samuel Andresen-Anderson, who hasn’t seen his mother Faye since childhood, the day she walked out of his life. Now she has reappeared, having committed an absurd crime that electrifies the nightly news, beguiles the Internet, and inflames a politically divided country.

Streep will reportedly play Faye, who the trade publication says is a “radical hippie with a sordid past,” at least according to the media in the story, although Samuel himself believes her to be someone totally different.

To save her, Samuel will have to embark on his own journey, from the suburban Midwest to New York City to the 1968 riots that rocked Chicago, uncovering long-buried secrets about the woman he though he knew, secrets that stretch across generations all the way back to Norway, home of the mysterious Nix.

Logan’s writing credits are a mixture of both good and bad. From 1999’s Any Given Sunday and 2012’s Spectre to The Time Machine and Star Trek: Nemesis, both of which debuted in 2002.

Showtime moved on from Penny Dreadfulearlier this year after three seasons. The series received modest reviews and a respectable audience, which starred Reeve Carney as Dorian Gray, Timothy Dalton as Sir Malcolm Murray, Eva Green as Vanessa Ives, Rory Kinnear as the Creature and Billie Piper as Lily Frankenstein.

Without a network attached to The Nix, it’s unclear what kind of timetable Logan and Warner Bros. are working on. Although a pilot could very well be in the works for early next year.

Michael began what has become nearly 19 years of entertainment reporting as the founder of SyFy Portal, which would become Airlock Alpha after he sold the SyFy brand to NBC Universal. He's based out of New York City where he is the editor of a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in the Bronx.